Santa Cruz >> About 50 Salvadorans gathered at Live Oak Elementary School on Friday night seeking alternatives to an immigration program that has allowed them to live legally in Santa Cruz and the U.S. for 17 years.

The Santa Cruz Salvadoran community was established before the Temporary Protected Status — U.S. protection for countries deemed too unsafe for their citizens to return — was extended to the embattled Central American nation in 2001. El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras and Nicaragua are among 10 countries currently offered TPS, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The protected status allows TPS recipients to live and work in the U.S. In January, President Donald Trump announced that El Salvador will be removed from the TPS program; that decision is effective Sept. 9, 2019.

Friday’s forum, which was hosted by the Community Action Board and the Live Oak Cradle to Career Initiative, ended with members of the audience asking in Spanish whether employers could help them to find alternative protections in the U.S., to which Santa Cruz Immigration Project attorney Doug Keegan said very few cases would qualify. He advised people to seek legal help immediately for guidance in a complex body of changing federal law.

Salvadorans have until March 19 to renew their TPS permits for the last time.

NO PLANS TO LEAVE

Maria Escobar, a Salvadoran with TPS who has raised her four children in Santa Cruz since 2001, said in Spanish that she will not return to El Salvador, where she has only one relative, her father.

“My country is dangerous. It is plagued with gang violence, poverty — there are no opportunities there,” Escobar said. She hopes her children, all U.S. citizens, will prevent her from having immigration troubles.

Escobar works as a bank janitor. She said she loves the U.S., where her children plan to attend college and careers.

“I am not worried. My children, they worry because they do not want me to have to leave,” Escobar said.

Santa Cruz immigration attorney Michael Mehr told the Sentinel there are a variety of alternatives to be considered for Salvadorans and other immigrants without citizenship or resident status in the U.S. In March 2017, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision, Ramirez v. Brown, granted TPS recipients the right to apply for a green card if they have spouses who are citizens or children at least 21 years old who are citizens of the U.S.

Salvadoran Miguel Zavala, a U.S. citizen who has lived in Santa Cruz since 2001, said in Spanish that it was an arduous process, but he was concerned for his brother, who has TPS.

“There is a lot of fear in the community,” Zavala said. “It’s terrible, all the information and misinformation out there. These forums help us plan for uncertainty.”

A series of earthquakes in early 2001, and years of unrest, qualified El Salvadorans for TPS.

In 1992 when he became Watsonville’s mayor, Oscar Rios became the first mayor of Salvadoran descent in the U.S. Rios, now a Watsonville City Council member, attended Friday’s meeting.

Rios came to the U.S. legally in 1961, he told the audience. He said immigrants must prepare themselves after Trump announced a slate of immigration reforms in the State of the Union address Tuesday in Washington.

Trump’s plan would expand a separate program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), that protects immigrants who were children when they were brought illegally to the U.S. The recommendation was among four immigration reforms to strengthen border security, protect up to 1.8 million DACA recipients, promote nuclear family migration — with protections for spouses and minor children only — and eliminate backlogged lottery visas for citizens moving from countries with historically low rates of immigration, according to the White House.

“We need to create a force,” Rios said in Spanish. He said a powerful immigrant-advocacy movement has formed since Trump’s proposal in September to end DACA.

For those with TPS, Mehr said he has never been so busy with early applications for renewal.

“We’re swamped,” Mehr said. “The immigration courts already are so clogged. These reforms are just going to clog them even more.”